1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the creation, manipulation and deployment of computer disk images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Disks and File Systems
A computer disk can be viewed as a linear list of data blocks called sectors. Most disks are used to store files and folders. A file's content is stored in one or more sectors, called data sectors. The mapping between a file and its data sectors is stored in special sectors called metadata. Metadata also stores file attributes (such as file name and access rights) and describe the structural relationship between files and folders. A disk's data and metadata sectors form a file system.
Metadata also keeps track of the location of free sectors. A free sector is neither used as data nor metadata. Its content is undefined until the sector becomes allocated as data or metadata for a new file or folder.
The specification of the layout and interpretation of metadata for a particular type of file system is called the file system format. There exist many file system formats; each has a distinct set of characteristics and limitations.
The process of creating a file system on an uninitialized or damaged disk is called formatting. This process creates metadata defining an empty file system. Once a disk is formatted, its file system can be populated with files and folders. In general, software applications create and access files through an operating system. The operating system forwards file requests to a file system driver, which is a software module capable of manipulating a file system's metadata. A file system driver is designed for a specific file system format and can generally run only on a specific operating system. Support for a given file system format on different operating systems generally requires multiple drivers, one for each operating system.
Some file system formats such as EXT2 are public, i.e., widely published and available for free. Anyone skilled in the art can examine a public file system format, and develop a driver or software tool to decode and manipulate any file system of that format. A file system format can also be proprietary, i.e., is owned by a single vendor and not publicly shared. In order to access files residing on a proprietary file system, software generally has to use the services of a driver developed by the format's owner. Some proprietary file system drivers exist only on specific operating systems; therefore, a software application may need to run on a specific operating system in order to access a proprietary file system. For example, the NTFS file system format is proprietary, and commercial NTFS drivers exist only on certain operating systems developed by Microsoft Corp., the owner of the format.
Disk Imaging
A disk image is a file that resides on a first computer and represents a snapshot of a second computer's disk. Image capture is the process of creating an image file from a computer's disk. A common disk imaging setup is to use two computers: a first computer with the disk being captured (the source disk), and a second computer containing the generated image file. In this setup, the disk imaging system generally comprises two software programs: an imaging client, running on the first computer, and an imaging server on the second computer. During capture, disk data is transferred from the client to the server over a network or a cable.
The reverse of the capture process is called deployment. During a deployment, a third computer's disk (the destination disk) is overwritten with data from an image file residing on the second computer. The data is transferred from the imaging server to an imaging client running on the third computer. The first and third computers can be the same.
A common use for disk imaging is backup and restore: A first computer is backed up by capturing an image of its disk, then the image is stored on a second computer. If the first computer's disk becomes damaged for any reason, it can be restored to its original state by deploying the image from the second computer back to the first computer. Disk imaging can also be used to clone a computer; an image of a first computer can thus be deployed to other computers.
Disk Image Formats
The internal format of an image file, that is, the way in which the file represents the state of a disk, is arbitrary and generally known only to the disk imaging system's vendor. Despite this, disk image formats can generally be classified into two types: sector-based and file-based.
Sector-Based Image Formats
A sector-based image format describes the state of a disk at the sector (or “block”) level. The simplest of such formats, called a “flat” image, represents all sectors of the disk as a linear list of bytes in the image file. For example, a flat file of 512,000 bytes can represent a disk with 1000 sectors of 512 bytes.
An advantage of a sector-based image file is that it represents an exact copy of the source disk, regardless of the file system format used on the disk. When it is deployed to a destination disk, the destination disk will contain an exact copy of the original file system. A sector-based imaging system therefore guarantees faithful data recoverability and reproducibility without the need to decode any file system; in other words, it does not require a file system driver.
A first disadvantage of the sector-based approach is, when an image is deployed, the destination disk must be at least as large as the original disk since the file system metadata on the original disk may encode the disk's capacity and assume that it never changes. This metadata is captured into the image file and copied to the destination disk. If the destination disk is smaller than the source disk, some sectors that the metadata assume exist may not exist on the destination disk, resulting in an inconsistent file system. Furthermore, if the destination disk is larger than the source disk, the deployed file system may not be able to take advantage of the additional space, since its metadata would assume that the disk has a smaller capacity.
Another disadvantage of a sector-based format is its inefficiency. A disk may have a large number of free sectors, that is, sectors that are not used as data or metadata, and thus have no useful content. These sectors may be scattered all over the disk, and may be difficult to identify because they generally contain an undefined set of bytes. A free sector's content is undefined because the sector may have been used earlier as data or metadata, then released after a file or folder was deleted. Most file system drivers don't erase (i.e., fill with zeros) freed sectors. A sector-based image format is therefore inefficient because it may include a disk's unused sectors.
Sparse Files
A combination of two technologies—sparse files and disk scrubbing—can solve the inefficiency problem. A sparse image file, similarly to a flat image file, is a sector-level representation of a complete disk. When a sparse image is first created, it represents a disk of a fixed capacity and filled with zeros, i.e., all sectors contain bytes with value zero (or any other predetermined null value). All sectors are said to be initially unallocated. A sparse file does not store the actual contents of unallocated sectors, since their content is known; it needs to store only information about which sectors are unallocated. For example, a sparse file may use a bit vector to keep track of which sectors are unallocated, with the bit values 0 and 1 representing the unallocated and allocated states, respectively. A newly created image file could thus represent an empty disk of 512 sectors by using 512 bits, or 512/8=64 bytes.
When a sector at a particular offset is written with non-zero contents for the first time, the image file marks the sector offset as allocated in the bit vector and creates one sector's worth of data in the file to hold the sector's new contents. This causes the image file to grow by at least one sector; it may need to grow by slightly more than one sector because additional information may be needed in order to keep track of the sector's location within the file. The actual size of a sparse image file may thus be smaller than the capacity of the disk that it represents if a large proportion of the disk's sectors remain unallocated.
When a source disk is captured into an image file, using a sparse format can greatly reduce the size of the file if free sectors in source disk were filled with zeroes, since the imaging system would only need to mark those sectors as unallocated in the file instead of copying their actual contents. As explained earlier, free sectors cannot be assumed to contain zeroes, since a free sector may previously have been allocated as a data or metadata sector, and subsequently freed but not explicitly erased with zeroes.
A common solution to this problem is to run a software tool generally known as scrubber on the source disk prior to the capture operation. The typical scrubbing tool is an application that runs on the operating system of the source computer. Its purpose is to erase free sectors with zeroes. The operating system does not usually allow applications to write directly to sectors, and even if it did, the application wouldn't know which sectors are free; only the file system driver has that knowledge.
The scrubber achieves its goal by creating a temporary file and then growing it by filling it with zeroes until the file system runs out of free disk space. The tool then deletes the file. This algorithm causes the file system driver to convert sectors that were free prior to the scrub operation to data sectors filled with zeroes. When the temporary file is deleted, the zeroed data sectors become free sectors, but their contents do not change.
Subsequently, during the image capture operation, the disk imaging system discards sectors filled with zeroes and does not store them in the sparse image file. Only the useful data is copied, thus keeping the image file's size to a minimum.
In practice, however, few imaging systems employ the combination of scrubbing and sparse files, because it is generally unreasonable to require a user to run the scrubbing tool on the source computer. First, the tool must generally be run manually, making the overall disk imaging process difficult to automate from start to finish. Second, by using up all free disk space, the tool may negatively interfere with other applications running on the operating system.
In summary, sector-based disk image formats are subject to two main limitations: the capacity matching problem, where the destination disk of deploy operation must be as large or larger than the source disk used to create the image, and the efficiency problem, where the image file may contain useless sectors, which unnecessarily increases its size and the time it takes to capture or deploy.
File-Based Image Formats
Unlike sector-based disk image formats, file-based formats store only file and folder information, not sectors. During a capture operation, the imaging system uses a file system driver to decode a source disk's file system. This allows the imaging system to enumerate all existing files and folders, and then read their attributes and contents. All of this information is copied and stored into a single image file using an internal layout that is either publicly known, such as the ZIP or TAR format, or proprietary and thus only known to a particular imaging system vendor.
To deploy a file-based image to an uninitialized or damaged destination disk, a file system driver is first used to format the disk in order to create an empty file system on it. The imaging system then reads the file and folder information from the image and uses the file system driver to re-create those files and folders in the destination file system.
The file-based approach does not have the weaknesses affecting the sector-based approach. First, the source and destination disks can have different capacities, as long as the destination disk has enough capacity to hold all the file and folder content encoded in the image file. For example, if the source disk has a capacity of 10 Gigabytes, but only 4 Gigabytes worth of files and folders are stored on it, the image could be deployed to a 5 Gigabyte destination disk. Second, file-based images are efficient since, by definition, they store only useful information.
The biggest issue with the file-based approach is its reliance on a file system driver, both during capture and deployment operations. A challenge in designing a file-based imaging system is deciding which file system driver to use and how to integrate it into the imaging process. Furthermore, many file system formats exist, so that an imaging system may need to interoperate with more than one file system driver.
One natural choice is to use the file system driver included with the source computer's operating system. A computer's disk generally contains an operating system. Without an operating system, the computer could not function correctly. An operating system is a collection of programs and software modules that exist as files in a file system on the disk. One of those modules is a file system driver capable of decoding the disk's file system. When an operating system starts—a process called booting—the operating system generally loads the file system driver into memory before most other drivers and modules. The file system driver is critical because it allows the operating system to load other modules from the file system, and to expose files to software applications, which are generally loaded last.
Since the file system driver itself is a file on the file system, one may wonder how it could be extracted from the file system in the first place, when no driver is loaded. Every type of operating system has a different way of addressing this issue. One possible solution is to store the sector offset corresponding to the beginning of the contents of driver file in a special sector not used by the file system, such as a master boot record (MBR). When the operating system first loads, it could use the services of the computer's BIOS (basic input/output system) to read the sector offset from the special sector, then load the driver file's contents into memory, and then execute the driver's code in order to decode the entire file system.
In order to take advantage of the operating system's file system driver to perform a capture operation, the imaging client can be implemented as an application running on the source computer. When the source computer is powered on and its operating system has finished loading, the imaging system initiates the image capture operation by starting the imaging client. The client first connects to the imaging server over the network, and then uses the operating system's file API (application programming interface) to enumerate and read all existing files and folders, streaming their content over to the imaging server.
The Issue of Open Files
An issue that arises when running the imaging client on the operating system is that some files, such as operating system files, may be locked, i.e., inaccessible to applications, including the imaging client. Other files may be accessible but open by other applications, meaning their contents may be cached in memory and may change while the imaging client copies the files. The imaging system thus faces the risk of capturing an incomplete or corrupt set of files.
It is thus difficult to image, or backup, a disk's files while active programs are accessing a subset of those files. One existing solution to the open files problem is to make an application provide an API to the imaging or backup system. The imaging system would use the special API to copy files opened by the application, instead of using the operating system's standard file access API. The special API would be responsible for exposing the correct and up-to-date contents of open files to the imaging system. This solution has been commonly implemented for database applications. The main drawback of the solution is that it is not general: files opened by applications that do not expose a special backup API cannot be reliably copied.
Deploying to a New or Damaged Disk
The file-based imaging approach faces another issue. In a deployment operation, the destination computer's disk's content may be uninitialized or damaged. An existing operating system may thus not exist on the destination computer, which means the imaging client cannot run on it. Even if the destination computer had a functional operating system, the disk imaging software user may want to overwrite it with the operating system and files from the image; however, the existing operating system would not allow any application to overwrite existing operating system files.
Offline Disk Imaging
Offline disk imaging is a solution to the open files and the deployment issues described earlier. The idea is to run a secondary operating system on the source computer or destination computer during imaging operations. Before a capture operation, the imaging system shuts down the source computer, causing all software from its disk, including applications and the primary operating system, to unload from memory. The imaging system then reboots the source computer from the secondary operating system, which can be loaded from a floppy disk, a CD-ROM, or from the network using a protocol such as PXE (Preboot Execution Environment).
The secondary operating system is self-sufficient, i.e., it does not need to read any files from the disk attached to the computer, and operates using only the computer's memory and processor. The secondary operating system includes and loads the imaging client, which can then access the disk safely because no other programs are accessing it.
If the secondary operating system includes a driver capable of decoding the source disk's file system, the imaging client can use the operating system's file API to read the disk's files. Otherwise, the client itself must include its own driver or software module in order to access the file system.
In a deployment operation, the destination computer is shut down, and then rebooted from the secondary operating system, which includes the imaging client. The client then uses the secondary operating system's file system driver, or its own driver, to format the destination disk, thereby creating an empty file system. The client then reads the image file from the imaging server, and re-creates the appropriate files and folders on the destination file system.
When the deployment operation finishes, the secondary operating system shuts down the destination computer and reboots it from its disk. This time, the computer loads the operating system that was restored from the image.
Choice of Secondary Operating System
The secondary operating system chosen by an imaging system vendor has to meet strict size requirements, since it cannot rely on the computer's disk for storage—it must be capable of functioning using only the computer's memory. It must also be small enough to fit on the boot medium, i.e., a floppy disk, a CD, or a memory image downloaded from the network.
Another requirement the secondary operating system must generally meet is low licensing cost, since it is an additional software component that contributes to the overall cost of the product. Consequently, disk imaging system vendors tend to choose a low-cost or free (in terms of software licensing cost) operating system for the task. Typical choices include DOS (disk operating system) and Linux.
For these reasons, the chosen secondary operating system is usually not a general-purpose operating system, and is likely to be different from the operating system residing on the source computer's disk.
The Issue of Proprietary File System Formats
Offline disk imaging requires the secondary operating system or imaging client to supply a file system driver compatible with the source disk's file system format.
Proprietary file system formats pose a challenge to imaging system designers, since drivers compatible with a particular proprietary format may exist only on a limited set of operating systems and tend to be supplied by few vendors, generally one. If the source computer's disk is formatted with a proprietary file system, the secondary operating system may not have a compatible driver, making the capture operation impossible.
A disk imaging system vendor has three choices for solving this problem. The first choice is to license a special-purpose operating system from the owner of the file system format, assuming that such an operating system exists and it meets other requirements, such as footprint. The drawback of this approach is the imaging system vendor may have to pay a higher license cost for this operating system compared to other choices for operating system.
The second choice is to license the specification to the proprietary format from the owner, and then develop a custom driver for the chosen secondary operating system, or a driver to be embedded in the imaging client itself. This approach is also costly, since it includes both the cost of the license, and the cost of developing new software. The file system format owner may also choose not to allow any company to license the format, which would make this approach impossible.
The third choice is to attempt to reverse-engineer the proprietary format, or to use a free file system driver that is based on reverse engineering. For instance, the NTFS format is proprietary and NTFS drivers are commercially available only on operating systems made by Microsoft. An NTFS driver exists on Linux, a free operating system, and was developed by using both publicly available information and information collected from reverse engineering. Unfortunately, reverse engineering is inherently risky and unreliable, which explains why the Linux NTFS driver is still at an experimental stage and known to be unstable for certain file operations, such as writes.
Contemporary Disk Imaging Systems
Products such as Symantec Ghost and Powerquest DriveImage represent the current state of the art in disk imaging systems. They employ a file-based image format, allowing them not only to copy only the useful contents of disks but also to capture from and deploy to disks of different sizes. In order to work around the problem of open files, these systems use the offline imaging method. The secondary operating system used tends to be based on DOS or Linux, since those operating systems tend to be lightweight, low cost, and easily customizable for disk imaging tasks. The imaging client used is generally a custom-developed program designed to run on the chosen secondary operating system. For instance, Symantec Ghost uses DOS as the secondary operating system, and its imaging client, called GHOST.EXE, is a DOS program.
Modern disk imaging systems generally support multiple file system formats. For example, Symantec Ghost supports EXT2, FAT, FAT32, and NTFS, the latter two of which are proprietary. In order to access proprietary file systems, existing disk imaging systems include their own file system driver, or build the functionality into the imaging client itself. For instance, the GHOST.EXE client contains code to decode the four different types of file system formats supported by the product, including the proprietary ones.
Whether or not the code to access proprietary file systems was developed based on reverse engineering, or from information licensed from other companies, is information not publicly known. One fact is certain: supporting proprietary file system formats increases the cost of the developing disk imaging products and thus the cost of the product to end customers.
Disk Image Editing
Contemporary disk imaging software sometimes includes a tool to browse the file and folders contained within an image file. Symantec's Ghost Explorer application, for example, allows a user to view files in an image through a graphical user interface; the user can also extract a file from the image and copy it onto the computer's native file system, or take an existing file from the file system and insert it into the image.
The file-based image format used by the majority of contemporary imaging systems does not lend itself well to internal modifications after an image has been created. The reason for this is that most image formats used today favor compactness over flexibility by tightly packing file and folder contents from the source disk into the image file. Sections of the image file may also be compressed to reduce the file's size even further. Modifying the contents of a file-based image may involve deleting files and adding new ones, potentially creating holes in the file. This phenomenon is called “fragmentation.”
Fragmentation increases file size and potentially reduces image deployment performance, since the imaging system may need to read multiple, non-contiguous areas of the image file in order to extract the correct sequence of files to expand onto the destination disk. To address this issue, a disk imaging product, such as Symantec Ghost, may provide a program to create a new image file from a modified and therefore fragmented image. Symantec Ghost calls this process “image recompilation.” Once an image is recompiled from a modified one, the modified one can be discarded.
In summary, existing file-based disk image formats are not well suited for content editing. Contemporary imaging software products provide tools for casual editing of a small number of files. More substantial modifications may reduce an image's efficiency or performance, a problem sometimes alleviated by recompiling the image.
Disk Image Identification and Tagging
When a disk image is created, a user is required to give it a file name. This name usually identifies the contents of the source disk from which the image was captured. For example, it may contain words indicating the type of operating system, the computer name, etc. Multiple disk images are sometimes archived together on a disk or other storage medium, so that they can be used later for deployment to new or existing computers. When the number of images grows, managing this image library can become challenging. In particular, before a deployment operation, a user may want to search the image library for a disk image that satisfies specific requirements, such as an operating system type, an operating system version, and possibly a number of software applications.
If a disk imaging system included a program for assisting a user to search an image library, this program would have a difficult time performing an accurate search based solely on file names. The first reason is that file names are usually created by humans, and may be ambiguous or not accurately reflect the contents of an image. For example, an imaging containing a Windows 2000 operating system may be named “Bob's Windows 2000”, or “Alice's Win2K computer.”
Second, file names are inherently restricted in length and cannot convey much information beyond basic computer identification. A disk imaging system could easily augment images with a set of standard attributes, such as computer name, network address, and operating system type. However, these attributes would still need to be manually entered by a user, and are thus subject to human error.
Most importantly, there is an abundance of intricate information contained in a disk image that is not commonly exposed by contemporary disk imaging systems. Since a disk image's ultimate purpose is to be deployed to a computer, it is important for a disk imaging system administrator to reliably query the software configuration encapsulated in an image, in order to determine whether an image is the appropriate one for a specific deployment operation.
For instance, operating systems and software applications consist of a multitude of files, many of which need to be frequently updated in order to fix bugs and security issues. Before deploying an image to a computer, a disk imaging system's administrator may want to know whether the software inside the image is up-to-date.
The software configuration of an image may also contain settings that reflect a particular hardware configuration. When an operating system is installed on a source computer, the operating system creates a configuration comprising data files and driver files, which is compatible only with the source computer's specific hardware configuration. If an image captured from the source computer is deployed onto a computer with a different hardware configuration, the operating system may fail to boot on the destination computer.
A disk imaging system's administrator thus has to keep track of which hardware configurations are compatible with which images. Today, this burden is largely the administrator's responsibility. When capturing a disk image, the administrator has to manually examine the source computer's hardware configuration, and tag the image with this information, either by giving it a specific name, attaching attributes to it, or by placing it in a folder with the appropriate name.
Image Deployment Issues
The hardware configuration issue described earlier underlines a well-known limitation of existing operating systems that affects disk imaging systems. When an operating system is installed on a computer's disk, it generally becomes dependent on that computer's hardware configuration. If the disk is moved to a second computer, or an image captured from that disk is deployed to a second computer, the operating system may fail to boot or function correctly on the second computer.
The root cause of this problem is a set of operating system files that are hardware-dependent and specifically configured for a particular type of hardware configuration. For example, in the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system, the following files are hardware-dependent:
1) The operating system kernel, which forms the operating system's core program. There exist two versions of this file: one designed for uniprocessor (single processor) computers, and one for multiprocessor computers.
2) The hardware abstraction layer (HAL) driver. There exist multiple versions of this file, each one corresponding to a particular type of computer circuit board, sometimes called “chipset.” For instance, there is a HAL for computers with a chipset supporting the Advanced Control and Power management Interface (ACPI), and one for computers without ACPI support.
3) The disk controller driver. The disk controller allows the operating system to access the disk and therefore files on the disk. In order to communicate with the disk controller, the operating system requires a driver that is compatible with the computer's disk controller.
4) Not only do the correct kernel and drivers need to be present, but they also have to be properly registered in one or more system configuration files. Windows 2000 uses a central configuration file called the “registry.” The registry contains thousands of entries containing software and system configuration information. Some of those entries specify the list of hardware devices that were detected when the operating system was first installed, including the disk controller. Another registry entry specifies the correct driver for the disk controller.
A computer's processor, chipset and disk controller are essential to an operating system's booting process; they are therefore sometimes called “critical devices.” When an operating system is installed on a computer, the installation process also installs a permutation of files and registry entries that is compatible with the computer's critical devices. When a Windows 2000 disk is moved or imaged to a different computer, the operating system may fail to boot if the previously installed permutation is not compatible with the destination computer's critical devices.
Existing Solutions to the Hardware Compatibility Issue
Some operating systems are designed or can be configured to start up on a diverse set of computer hardware configurations. For example, SysLinux, a variant of the Linux operating system, is capable of re-detecting a computer's hardware, including critical devices, on every boot. This allows it to select the correct kernel and drivers at run-time.
Other operating systems, such as Windows 2000, must boot using a specific kernel and HAL, which are identified by predefined names. A Windows 2000 file system may contain multiple versions of kernels and HALs, but only the ones named with the predefined names will be used to boot the operating system.
A common but inelegant solution to the hardware compatibility issue is to create one image file per family of similar computers. For instance, if a user wants to create an image of a computer running Windows 2000 and a custom application, and to be able to deploy this image on both uniprocessor and multiprocessor computers, he would have to manually install the software on two different source computers, one uniprocessor and the other multiprocessor. The user would then have to create two separate images, one for each computer type. At deployment time, the user must select the image that is compatible with the destination computer.
Another solution is to use additional software specifically designed to help the operating system cope with diverse hardware configurations. Microsoft Sysprep is an example of such a software tool. A user runs Sysprep on a Windows 2000 computer before capturing an image of that computer. Sysprep accepts a file specifying all of the possible disk controllers that a destination computer might use when the image is deployed in the future. The tool copies drivers for the specified devices to the file system, creates the corresponding registry entries, and finally shuts down the computer to prepare it for offline disk capture. When a destination computer deployed from a Sysprep'ed image starts, the operating system first detects the active disk controller, finds the matching entry that Sysprep created in the registry, and uses the entry to locate the correct driver. This solution works because multiple drivers can be present in the file system, but only the correct one is loaded.
The Sysprep approach has several limitations. First, it can handle changes only in the disk controller device. If the source and destination computer have different chipsets or processors, the operating system will not be able to start on the destination computer. The reason is for this is that the kernel and HAL are the first operating system files to load into memory, and if they don't match the hardware, the operating system can crash before it has a chance to detect other devices or consult the registry. Sysprep cannot simply copy multiple versions of the HAL and kernel into the file system, since the operating system will use only the ones that are hard-coded with the predefined names. In other words, at boot time, there may be no way to select the correct kernel or HAL based on the hardware configuration.
Second, a Sysprep'ed image is compatible only with the set of devices specified at the time Sysprep was executed on the source computer. When a new computer equipped with a new disk controller model is added to an organization, it may not be compatible with existing disk images.
Third, running Sysprep on a computer before capturing its image is a manual and error-prone operation that adds overhead and complexity to the overall disk imaging process. Some contemporary disk imaging products, such as Symantec Ghost Enterprise, include software to automate parts of the Sysprep process. However, they require a user to install special software on a computer before it can be Sysprep'ed and captured.
Image Customization
An image is often used to make multiple clones of a base computer. The approach is to capture an image from the base computer's disk, and then deploy the same image to multiple destination computers. Before the initial image is captured, the base computer is configured with an operating system and common set of software applications that are required on all clones. Any computer deployed from this image would inherit the same set of software.
Computer cloning faces a well-known issue: a clone generally requires a small set of network parameters to be reset to values unique to the clone in order to function correctly on a network shared with the base computer and other clones. Those parameters are generally stored on disk, and therefore in the image. They may include a globally unique security ID, a computer name, and a network address. Two computers running with identical parameters may conflict with each other on a network.
When a clone is deployed from an image, it inherits the source computer's parameters. In order to avoid network conflicts, the parameters must be set to new values that are unique to the clone.
The Sysprep tool discussed earlier provides a limited system parameter customization capability. When a source computer is prepared with Sysprep before image capture, the tool copies a small program, called setup program, to the file system, and configures the operating system to run that setup program the next time the operating system boots. The tool also copies a data file containing instructions for the setup program. The tool then shuts down the operating system in preparation for an image capture operation.
The resulting image represents a snapshot of the source computer just after running Sysprep but before the next system boot. The data file contains new system parameter values to set on the next system boot. When a destination computer deployed from the image starts for the first time, the setup program reads the parameters from the data file, and changes the computer's parameters based on those values.
In order to set up each clone with a different set of parameters, a disk imaging system may use the image editing functionality described earlier to modify the contents of the data file in an image just before deploying it. The modifications can be used to change any of the system parameters. The new values to use can be provided by a user or be generated automatically by the imaging system using predefined rules.
Virtualized Computer Systems
The advantages of virtual machine technology have become widely recognized. Among these advantages is the ability to run multiple virtual machines on a single host platform. This makes better use of the capacity of the hardware, while still ensuring that each user enjoys the features of a “complete,” isolated computer. Depending on how it is implemented, virtualization also provides greater security since it can isolate potentially unstable or unsafe software so that it cannot adversely affect the hardware state or system files.
See FIG. 1. As is well known in the field of computer science, a virtual machine (VM) is a software abstraction—a “virtualization”—of an actual physical computer system. A virtual machine 500 is installed as a “guest” on a “host” hardware platform 100. Two configurations are in general use—a “hosted” configuration, illustrated in FIG. 1, in which an existing, general-purpose operating system (OS) forms a “host” OS 220 that is used to perform certain I/O operations; and a non-hosted configuration, illustrated in FIG. 2, in which a kernel customized to support virtual computers takes the place of the conventional operating system. The main components of these two configurations are outlined briefly below. This invention works with either configuration.
As FIG. 1 shows, the hardware platform 100 includes one or more processors (CPUs) 110, system memory 112 (usually high-speed RAM), and at least one persistent, mass storage device, which will typically be a disk 114. The hardware 100 will also include other conventional mechanisms such as one or more conventional network connection device(s) 172 (such as a network adapter or network interface card—“NIC”) for transfer of data between the various components of the system and a bus or network.
System software 200 includes the host operating system 220, which will include drivers 222 as needed for various connected devices 400. The user's monitor and input devices such as a keyboard, mouse, trackball, touchpad, etc, are usually also included among the devices for obvious purposes. The host operating system (OS) 220 may be any known OS and will therefore have all typical components.
Each VM 500 will have both virtual system hardware 501 and guest system software 502. The virtual system hardware typically includes at least one virtual CPU 510, virtual system memory 512, at least one virtual disk 514, and one or more virtual devices 540. Note that a disk—virtual or physical—is also a “device,” but is usually considered separately because of its essential role. All of the virtual hardware components of the VM may be implemented in software using known techniques to emulate the corresponding physical components. The guest system software includes a guest operating system 520 (which may simply be a copy of a conventional operating system), and drivers 522 as needed for the various virtual devices 540; in particular, a driver VDSK 524 will be included to manage access to the virtual disk 514.
If the VM is properly designed, then it will not be apparent to the user that any applications 503 running within the VM are running indirectly, that is, via the guest OS and virtual processor. Applications 503 running within the VM will act just as they would if run on a “real” computer, except for a decrease in running speed that will be noticeable only in exceptionally time-critical applications. Executable files will be accessed by the guest OS 520 from the virtual disk or virtual memory, which will simply be portions of the actual physical disk or memory allocated to that VM. Once an application is installed within the VM, the guest OS retrieves files from the virtual disk just as if they had been pre-stored as the result of a conventional installation of the application. The design and operation of virtual machines is well known in the field of computer science.
Some interface is usually required between a VM and the underlying host platform (in particular, the CPU), which is responsible for actually executing VM-issued instructions and transferring data to and from the actual memory 112 and storage devices 114. A common term for this interface is a “virtual machine monitor” (VMM), shown as component 600. A VMM is usually a thin piece of software that runs directly on top of a host, or directly on the hardware, and virtualizes resources of the physical host machine. The interface exported to the VM is then the same as the hardware interface of the machine (or at least of some machine), so that the guest OS cannot determine the presence of the VMM.
Although the VM (and thus the user of applications running in the VM) cannot usually detect the presence of the VMM, the VMM and the VM may be viewed as together forming a single virtual computer. They are shown in FIG. 1 as separate components for the sake of clarity. There may be several VM/VMM pairs (virtual computers) running on a common host; a single VM/VMM pair is shown in FIG. 1 for simplicity.
Moreover, the various virtualized hardware components such as the virtual CPU(s) 510, the virtual memory 512, the virtual disk 514, and the virtual device(s) 540 are shown as being part of the VM 500 for the sake of conceptual simplicity—in actual implementations these “components” are usually constructs or emulations exported to the VM by the VMM, for example, as emulators 640. One advantage of such an arrangement is that the VMM may be set up to expose generic devices, which facilitates VM migration and hardware platform-independence.
The configuration illustrated in FIG. 1 is used in the Workstation products of VMware, Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif. In this configuration, the VMM 600 is co-resident at system level with the host operating system 220 such that both the VMM and the host OS can independently modify the state of the host processor. However, the VMM calls into the host OS (symbolized by the dashed, double-ended arrow) via a special one of the drivers 222 and a dedicated one of the user-level applications 300 to have the host OS perform certain I/O operations of behalf of the VM. The virtual computer in this configuration is thus hosted in that it runs on an existing host hardware platform together with an existing host OS. A hosted virtualization system of the type illustrated in FIG. 1 is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,496,847 (Bugnion, et al., “System and Method for Virtualizing Computer Systems,” 17 Dec. 2002), which is incorporated here by reference.
In other implementations, a dedicated kernel takes the place of and performs the conventional functions of the host OS, and virtual computers run on the kernel. FIG. 2 illustrates such a configuration, with a kernel 800 that serves as the system software for several VM/VMM pairs 200/300, . . . , 200n/300n. Compared with a system in which VMMs run directly on the hardware platform, use of a kernel offers improved performance for I/O operations and facilitates provision of services that extend across multiple VMs (for example, for resource management).
Compared with the hosted deployment, a kernel may offer greater performance because it can be co-developed with the VMM and be optimized for the characteristics of a workload consisting of VMMs. The ESX Server product of VMware, Inc., has such a configuration. A kernel-based virtualization system of the type illustrated in FIG. 2 is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,961,941 (“Computer Configuration for Resource Management in Systems Including a Virtual Machine”), which issued on Nov. 1, 2005 and which is also incorporated here by reference.
Virtual Disks
As mentioned above a virtual machine monitor exposes a set of hardware devices, or virtual devices, to the guest. Those devices include a virtual disk controller and a virtual disk. A virtual disk usually exposes the same abstraction as a real disk, that is, a linear list of sectors; however, a VMM may choose to implement virtual disks as regular files on the host. Since a virtual disk file represents the sector-by-sector contents of a disk, it is by definition a type of sector-based image file.
Sparse Virtual Disks
A VMM may implement a virtual disk using a sparse, sector-based image format. This design can keep virtual disk files small if the amount of data written to the disk is smaller than the disk's capacity. For instance, when a user creates a virtual machine, he is usually also allowed to specify the capacity of the virtual disk. The VMM then defines this disk to be filled entirely with sectors containing all zeroes. A newly created sparse virtual disk file is thus small in size, regardless of its capacity. When the user runs the virtual machine and installs software in it, including a guest operating system, the virtual disk file will grow in size, but only to the extent needed to hold the file system metadata and data generated by the guest.
Copy-on-Write and Undoable Disks
Most existing virtual machine products, such as those sold by VMware, Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., employ the copy-on-write technique to allow a virtual machine to modify its virtual disk without actually modifying its virtual disk file. When copy-on-write is enabled for a virtual disk, modifications to the file are stored in a separate file, sometimes called a redo log. A redo log specifies which sector locations in the original disk were written and contains the modified contents for those locations. A redo log, combined with the original virtual disk it is derived from, represents a second, logical disk whose contents are defined as the original disk's contents with the exception of the modified sectors specified in the redo log. Copy-on-write enables a virtual machine user to discard changes to a virtual disk in case the changes are temporary or contain accidental modifications to files.
Redo logs may also be “chained” as a sequence of “delta” disks, each of which records writes to the virtual disk since a most recent preceding checkpoint. The first such delta disk thus records changes to the initial state of the virtual disk; the second delta disk records writes after the first delta disk is checkpointed; and so on. The virtual disk can then be “committed” to any checkpointed state by incorporating into it the writes recorded in all delta disks up to and including the chosen checkpoint.
Virtual Machines and Disk Imaging Software
A powered-off (i.e., inactive) virtual machine generally comprises a configuration file that describes the VM's set of hardware devices, such as memory size and input/output ports, and a virtual disk file. Those two files define a complete computer, and can be moved or copied from one host computer to another. Virtual machines can thus be viewed as mobile computers, totally encapsulated and represented by a set of files.
Virtual disks and conventional disk images are similar in that they encapsulate the state of a computer's disk. Cloning a virtual machine, however, is generally much easier than the equivalent image deployment operation on physical computers. In order to clone a virtual machine, a user needs simply to make copies of its configuration and virtual disk files, and place them on the host computer of choice. To power on and run the cloned virtual machine, all that the host computer needs is to have the appropriate VMM software installed.
Deployment Issues
Virtual machine cloning is subject to the same network parameter customization issue that affects disk imaging of physical computers. A virtual machine cloned from a base virtual machine may conflict with the base machine if its network parameters aren't reset to new and unique values.
Virtual machine cloning generally does not suffer from the hardware compatibility issue, since VMM software usually exposes a stable set of virtual hardware devices. In other words, the virtual hardware visible to a cloned VM is identical to that of the base VM as long as the virtual machine configuration file—in addition to the virtual disk file—is copied during the cloning process.
The hardware compatibility issue does arise, however, when a physical computer needs to be converted into a virtual machine, and vice-versa. This leads to a discussion of the physical/virtual interoperability problem.
Physical and Virtual Interoperability
As virtual machine software grows in popularity, information technology (IT) professionals increasingly work in a computing environment involving both physical computers and virtual machines. In particular, there is a need to easily convert physical computers to virtual computers, and vice-versa. Server consolidation is a context in which this conversion capability is particularly desirable. The idea behind server consolidation is to take multiple server computers and run them as virtual machines on a single physical computer. The benefits of server consolidation include reduced hardware costs, since only one physical computer is needed, and possibly reduced management costs, since the servers run on a centralized platform.
In order to implement server consolidation, an IT professional may want to migrate multiple existing physical server computers into virtual machines hosted on a single, more powerful physical computer. Migration of an existing server is usually more attractive than re-creating an equivalent computer inside a virtual machine from scratch, since an existing server already has a functioning software stack that was previously configured, tuned, and validated for the intended business mission.
Unfortunately, just like a real computer, a virtual machine exposes a specific set of critical devices, including processor, chipset, and disk controller. Those virtual devices don't have to—and usually don't—match the host computer's hardware. Consequently, physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration is subject to the same hardware compatibility issues that plague disk imaging systems.
One possible approach for making virtual machines easier to migrate to is to enhance a VMM to expose virtual hardware that more closely resembles that of a typical physical computer. However, implementing a new virtual device in software can require an expensive engineering effort. It can also be somewhat wasteful, since some features of a physical hardware device, such as the advanced power management capabilities of an ACPI chipset, may not be meaningful or useful in the context of a virtual machine.
Virtual-to-physical (V2P) migration is another form of conversion that an IT professional may want to perform. A common scenario that illustrates this is the development and test environment. Virtual machines are a popular platform for developing and testing software applications because they provide the following benefits: the ability to roll back a test computer's state by using undoable disks; the ability to test software on multiple operating systems running in different virtual machines; and the ability to simulate a network of multiple machines using a single physical computer, using a VMM's virtual network capabilities.
Once a complete software stack comprising an operating system and application is tested and validated in a virtual machine, an IT professional may choose to move the stack into production by deploying it onto a physical computer to achieve maximum performance.
Running Disk Imaging Software Inside a Virtual Machine
In order to solve the conversion and hardware compatibility problem between physical and virtual machines, it is possible to run a combination of existing tools such as Sysprep and disk imaging software within virtual machines. For example, in order to convert a physical computer into a virtual machine, a user might first run Sysprep on the physical computer, shut it down, capture an image from the computer, and temporarily store the image on a second computer running the disk imaging server software. The user then creates a new virtual machine with an empty virtual disk, and then powers it on from a secondary operating system loaded from a virtual floppy disk or CD-ROM; this causes the disk imaging client to get loaded into the virtual machine's memory. The imaging server then deploys the image to the client, which has the side effect of populating the virtual machine's virtual disk. Finally, when the image deployment process finishes, the virtual machine can restart from its own virtual disk, thereby loading its own operating system.
When the client writes to what appears like a physical disk, it issues sector-level I/O requests to this disk. The virtual machine monitor that controls the virtual machine intercepts those requests and translates them to reads and writes to the appropriate data areas within the virtual disk file.